


The Psychology of a Boy Who Killed Adolescence

by Hikaru Yuy (hikaruyuy)



Series: AC Worldbuilding Courtesy of Karu [2]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Meta, Psychology, Violence, mentions of canon events involving child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:40:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25340266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikaruyuy/pseuds/Hikaru%20Yuy
Summary: A psychological analysis of Pilot 01 and how he would cope with life post-Endless Waltz as a soldier facing the life of a civilian.
Series: AC Worldbuilding Courtesy of Karu [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1835275
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5
Collections: Worldbuilding in the AC Universe





	The Psychology of a Boy Who Killed Adolescence

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for volume two of the Rhythm Generation Gundam Wing zine, this is my absolute favourite of all the meta I've written for this fandom if I'm honest and sincere with myself. Many thanks to lifeaftermeteor (LAM) for letting me contribute something!
> 
> I wrote this as a way to understand Heero Yuy as a character, and I shared it not just with the zine audience and contributors, but now with y'all as well, in the hopes that now everyone else can understand Heero a bit better too.

#  **Introduction**

When one thinks of Heero Yuy, what sort of image comes to mind? Surely it's the "perfect soldier" who was trained by Doctor J trying to execute his mission objectives, only to be hurled into a war that became utterly unpredictable. The stoic, cold seeming boy Doctor J described as "kind" regains his humanity by the endgame, or so it seems. But what happens to the "perfect soldier" once the war is over and the battlefields are vacated? This question is rather multi-faceted, and there are some facts that need to be explained before the post-war happenings can even be pondered.

#  **Before the War**

##  **The First Catalyst**

So the question you might be asking now is, “What’s Heero’s damage? How and why did he end up with such guilt and self-loathing?” There isn’t really a singular cause. It's not solely because of the training that he had to endure, which was mostly physical (although there was certainly a psychological component to it). If anything, his training would have caused a lot of cognitive dissonance. A life of murder is difficult to bear when you have compassion for human life; under the tutelage of Odin Lowe, however, Heero would be used to it and develop some way to cope with it. The desensitization training he later received under Doctor J would help him in that department by numbing him to it or blocking it out completely. 

Heero was trained from such a young age to kill thanks to his mentor Odin Lowe. This was honed further under the watchful eye of both Dekim Barton and Doctor J. So he's not just an assassin's protégé, he's a living, breathing weapon. One designed and modified in such a way that he is dangerous to enemies and allies alike. Heero didn't bat an eye when Odin was shot and killed on L3-X18999, because Odin prepared Heero for his departure. He didn't blink when he fired a rocket launcher at a group of OZ cadets, severely injuring their leader. In these instances, it was all “part of the job.” Odin was a target. OZ were targets. Regardless of actual innocence, each one of them had a reason for being targeted. No one else ended up unintentionally caught up in these attacks. 

Heero was taught to keep a lid on his emotions. He was taught that there is a time and a place for emotions; when it comes to something such as a mission, emotions are barred entirely. For the most part, Heero is able to do this. It's what he was trained to do, after all. However, one mission in particular ends up defenestrating all of that in the form of innocent people becoming unintended targets.

The main catalyst for Heero—psychologically speaking—happens in AC 194. He's fourteen years old, on a training mission where the objective is to rig up an Alliance military base with explosives and destroy it in the middle of the night. While scouting the place out, Heero ends up meeting a little girl who is just out and about walking her dog, minding her own business. She asks Heero if he's lost, to which he replies, "I've been lost ever since I was born." In a way, he's not wrong: he lost his parents, his home, and his sense of self when he was just a child, only living through assumed names and identities. He played the part of Odin Lowe's son as they traveled around the colonies for example, so as to not arouse suspicion. As a result, Heero has little to no sense of who he really is. He's lost himself somewhere and has no idea how to try and find that little boy he left behind. That little boy, for all intents and purposes, is dead.

Hours later, when Heero actually detonates the explosives, a Leo standing near the military base gate perimeter lands on an apartment building and explodes. Heero is overcome with regret, standing there in disbelief. After, he explores the ruins of the apartment complex, where he finds the body of the girl's dog amongst the rubble. When he reports back, Dekim Barton orders him to be retrained at once, because Heero is not supposed to feel such emotions as a weapon. Heero's simply supposed to follow orders, and disregard the lives lost as a result of his action. Heero's guilt is palpable, to such a degree, that in Episode Zero, Heero deems his mission "complete" after visiting the gravesite of the dog, and puts a gun to his head. It’s not known whether the gun was loaded, if Heero intended to actually commit suicide or if, like with Mariemaia in Endless Waltz, he was going for the symbolism that his “death” would cause.

Heero, without realizing it, made a mistake when he let his emotions get the better of him; as shown throughout the series, we are shown that this is something Heero struggles with at times whilst fighting, depending on his opponent. 

But if Heero is a soldier, killing people is “part of the job." So why did the little girl and her dog affect him so? His mentor was a gun-for-hire, accepting money in exchange for people's lives. Heero had no problem firing on OZ cadets the day Odin was murdered, and that was a group of 12 year olds. Heero's training as a soldier was to dehumanize the enemy to make it even easier. Though Heero doesn't like killing people, that's the only life he's ever known—it's second nature to him.

This leads us to the catalytic aftermath.

##  **The Aftermath**

Because of a miscalculation, or an event otherwise beyond his control, Heero's mission didn't go according to plan. That little girl paid a price she never signed up to pay in the first place. She was an innocent bystander. He wrestles with the guilt he feels and how it doesn't match up with how he should feel as a so-called weapon. Casualties are inevitable when it comes to war, so why does it bother him so much?

That little girl met with him earlier in the day and gave him a present in the form of a flower. She showed him kindness despite not even knowing him. An assumption can be made that Heero spends most of his time being overlooked by everyone. And later on the one person who notices him and interacts with him ends up dead because of it. An incident like that can cause a “false causation¹." Heero might think that, had their paths not crossed, maybe she wouldn’t have died. As a result, in the future, Heero will make sure no one gets too close lest they share the same fate as her. If their paths never crossed, and the apartment building ended up destroyed, Heero might not have felt as bad. A twinge of guilt for the innocent lives lost? Certainly, because Heero isn’t heartless. But he could’ve lived with it.

Instead, he ended up having a personal investment, however small. And that can lead to any number of thoughts as a result of the guilt he now feels. Heero could forever wonder if there was something, anything, that he could've done to prevent those deaths. He could ponder if, by virtue of that little girl associating with him for the briefest of moments, that was why things happened as they did. If he'd just ignored her, would that have made a difference?

Heero's kindness was deemed a weakness, an unforgivable flaw. So what if there are civilian casualties? The mission was successful, wasn't it? Whether Heero ever went through retraining, it's not known—if anything, Heero had a lesson in keeping his emotions buried deeper. As mentioned above, Heero didn't cope very well with this incident, even made an attempt on his own life. This isn't the only time Heero tries to offer his own life in exchange for some kind of atonement, but it is the first. This event has a ripple effect in how he treats certain people, like Relena Darlian, even if at first glance it doesn't seem to.

* * *

¹ A false causation, also known as "false cause-and-effect", is a fallacy where one attributes an event being the result of something completely unrelated. An example of this: in the summer, gas prices and murder rates tend to rise, therefore a false causation would be attributing a rise in murder rates in the hike in gas prices.

#  **During the War**

##  **"Why Can't I Kill This Girl?!"**

After Heero crashes to Earth in episode 1, he crosses paths with Relena Darlian, the daughter of the vice foreign minister. Because of the covert nature of the mission he is tasked with, Heero isn’t supposed to be discovered or have his cover blown. Failure means death. Without hesitation he tries to self-detonate, only for the device to misfire and for him to need to retreat. Later that same day, he comes across Relena and rips up the birthday invitation she hands to him before making a threat on her life.

The whole point of Heero being so outwardly callous towards this girl who wants nothing more than to befriend him is so he doesn’t have yet another innocent dragged into his life against their will, and end up getting hurt or killed as a result of just knowing him. After all, that’s what happened to that little girl. What Heero doesn’t count on is for Relena to be undeterred by his threats and the fact that he really is quite dangerous. The next logical step would be for Heero to silence her, which considering she is an obstacle to completing his mission successfully. Not only that, the more time she spends with him, the more she finds out; the longer she hangs around him, the deeper she gets involved. Heero can’t risk her involvement. His mission demands secrecy. He has his orders to neutralize anyone who gets in his way, whether they be ally, foe, or completely neutral. Yet despite Heero’s repeated attempts, he can’t bring himself to pull the trigger.

In episode 6 Heero shields Relena from a mobile suit attack using Wing, questioning why the entire time. After all, he would be better off if she died, wouldn’t he? She knows too much. The struggle between being a soldier and being compassionate is plain to see as he switches between fighting OZ and making sure Relena is safe. He can’t kill Relena, nor can he allow Relena to be killed, because she’s done nothing wrong. If he’s going to have blood on his hands, it shouldn’t be that of the innocent. To Heero, Relena is the same as that little girl. If he kills Relena, he’s killing the little girl again. The incident haunts him to the point where he will go out of his way to avoid it happening again.

It should be noted that Heero’s official orders are simply to go after OZ, and make them pay for oppressing the Colonies. As we are shown in Episode Zero, Doctor J has always given Heero the choice to follow his orders to the letter, or to think for himself and go about things in his own way. Given a choice, Heero always picks the more compassionate option², and Doctor J doesn’t seem the least bit bothered so long as Heero otherwise follows orders. Leaving one girl alive isn’t going to otherwise hurt Heero’s mission.

* * *

² Doctor J heard about an assassination plot against Vice Foreign Minister Darlian, and gave Heero three choices: to aid in the assassination, to thwart it, or to ignore the situation altogether; Heero chose to save Darlian’s life. When it came to embarking on Operation Meteor, he again gave Heero three choices: to go through with the original plan, to go through with the modified version, or to land on Earth and disappear. Heero chose the option to just go after OZ instead of punishing all of humanity.

##  **The Second Catalyst**

In episode 7, Treize sets a trap for the Gundam pilots so that the Alliance pacifists are no longer an obstacle, by placing them in an OZ shuttle, causing Heero to mistake them for OZ leaders. He destroys the shuttle with Wing, only to learn shortly after that they were in the midst of peace talks and discussion about demilitarization and disarmament. In response, Heero actually shuts down, having made the same mistake twice in killing innocent people (or as innocent as anyone involved with the Alliance could be, at any rate), this time as part of a mistaken identity plot. He's more than content to let himself be killed by enemy mobile suits until episode 8, when Sally pleads for him to stop the New Edwards base from self-detonating, which wouldn't just kill the pilots, but anyone and anything in a 300 kilometer³ radius. That’s a lot of innocent people dead because of his mistake.

Would this have happened had the Gundams decided not to show up? Would this have happened if Heero had decided against attacking the shuttle with the pacifists? There's no way of knowing. But for so many innocent people to die, all because of Heero playing right into Treize Khushrenada's hands, would be completely unacceptable to him. That little girl would be killed hundreds of thousands of times over again, and he would have no one to blame but himself. Though he stops the base from self-detonating, and thus ends up saving hundreds of thousands of people from dying, it doesn’t make up for taking out those peace minded Alliance officials. Because of Heero’s actions, Earth and the Colonies are now driven even further apart.

* * *

³ That's a little over 184 miles in any direction; imagine the entirety of California from San Jose down—that's the blast zone.

##  **“Life is cheap, especially mine.”**

Heero always feels the need to atone for things; his life philosophy is “an eye for an eye” way of thinking. If you help him out, he owes it to at least return the favor should the need arise. An example of this can be seen between him and Duo--Duo got him out of that Alliance hospital, so now Heero owes it to Duo to take out the mobile suit trying to take him out. If he kills someone you hold dear, he’s going to offer his life as recompense. If he’s dead, it’ll help ease the family’s suffering because then he can’t hurt someone else in the same way. The biggest example of this is with the Noventa family, starting with the field marshal’s granddaughter Sylvia. 

Heero visits Sylvia at Noventa’s grave and offers her his life in exchange for the one he took. He can’t bring her grandfather back, but he can forfeit his. The only life Heero’s ever known is that of a life for a life. Regardless of how much he thinks his life is actually worth, if it can assuage a family’s grief, he’s all for it. If you go by the line, “Life is cheap, especially mine,” he doesn’t think his life in particular is worth much at all, because he is a soldier, and soldiers in a war are easily expendable. No one will miss him if he dies, he doesn’t have a home to go back to. In a way, that should be freeing, because he has nothing to lose by fighting. That is why it’s so easy for Heero to press that self-detonation switch in episode 10, because what does he have to lose if it means the Colonies are safe? But when the pilots are no longer able to fight because the Colonies sided with OZ, he isn’t exactly sure what to do, and looks for ways to fight.

Looking at it another way, Heero might feel as though his life has no purpose unless he’s on a battlefield, deep in the figurative trenches. What is the point of him being around and existing if there’s no war, no battles, no conflict? It’s why he ends up fighting in a mobile suit with remnants from OZ, because soldiers like him only feel “fulfilled” when in battle, because they have some kind of meaning to their lives. This is, after all, the only life he’s ever known.

#  **Post-War**

##  **Mental Health**

I’ve told you a bit about Heero’s background, so the next question naturally is, “How does this end up playing out after the war?”

Heero definitely has some symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as recurrent nightmares about the things he’s done (the little girl and her dog in particular). It wouldn’t be a stretch for other things he’s done during the war conflict itself to cause nightmares, such as OZ’s trap with the Alliance pacifists as bait, not to mention his near death experiences. One could surmise that Heero has depression as he tends to fixate on anything that causes him to experience guilt, has very little self worth, and he’s not very fond of himself, especially early on in the series. Depression and PTSD tend to be comorbid⁴, with the depression ending up as a symptom of PTSD.

To tackle and unravel all of this, Heero would need to go through therapy. When it comes to therapy there are a few different methods, all designed to target different things like eating disorders or phobias. In Heero’s case he would likely undergo cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), which is one of the most common “talk therapies,” and focuses on changing thought patterns that lead to different behaviours by challenging them. It can help with things such as depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and PTSD. Heero’s best chance would be to find a therapist who not only deals with CBT, but specialises in patients who have dealt with extreme trauma, or other war veterans, to help him begin to properly process it.

Unpacking trauma is a messy, time consuming business that requires a lot of patience. Not all trauma has to be unpacked, but in Heero’s case he would need to make peace with the little girl and what happened with Noventa. These two events, especially the former, seem to eat away at him, so unboxing them would improve his quality of life and ability to cope.

* * *

⁴ As defined by the Oxford dictionary: "the simultaneous presence of two chronic diseases or conditions in a patient."

##  **Reintegration into Civilian Life**

Outside of Heero’s personal mental health, there is also the fact that Heero was raised to be an assassin since he was a child, and in a post-war world where soldiers and the like are no longer deemed necessary, Heero might initially have a hard time meshing with civilian life, given that Heero wasn’t ever really part of civilian life, so instead of Heero being “reintegrated” into normal life, he would be “integrated.” Regardless of the term, it would likely be a slow transition for him aided in part by a therapist helping him change different patterns of behaviour that will help him succeed in “the real world,” in addition to discerning if he has a support system and establishing one if he does not (considering Heero has no family and prefers to be by himself, this one might be a little difficult since Heero’s loner tendencies might lead him to [accidentally] isolate himself from others). 

Would Heero be able to fully integrate into society at large? He’s young, so it is entirely possible. Results wouldn’t be immediate, and it would likely take years to undo all of Heero’s training and get him to think like an average citizen as opposed to a soldier. There are different factors as to whether Heero’s training could ever be fully extinct⁵ depending on what he decides to do with his life.

* * *

⁵ "Extinct" in psychology basically means completely undoing psychological conditioning.

##  **Job Prospects**

Due to Heero’s highly specialized training, he has a lot of skills that would thrive in counterintelligence work, especially when it comes to cyber intelligence. Whether Heero would go for a job like that is up to interpretation. Would Heero be happy launching attacks over a cyber network? What about hacking in order to gain information like he did during the war? It would bring comfort to him since he’s so familiar with it, but that could also be a bane. The fact that Heero is really good at computers also opens up other career options, such as general Information Technology work, becoming a SysAdmin, or helping with IT Security for major companies or even the government. If he truly wanted to break out of his comfort zone, he could learn a trade, or put skills he learned as a mobile suit pilot into a different application.

Heero might be drawn to a job that allows him to work from home, or otherwise work remotely, in the event he finds himself unable to leave his bed or living arrangement. Most computer work can be done remotely, and I imagine in the future the sheer majority can be done over a network connection.

##  **Life Prospects**

After the war, Heero would more than likely crave normalcy. What do teenagers do? They go to school, they form friendships and relationships, participate in sport and extracurricular activities. Heero shows competency in basketball whilst he and Duo are undercover as students. Due to his social skills (which he would more than likely work on in therapy), he might steer towards either smaller group activities, or things he could do solo. Heero could very well be one of those students who excels without much effort--he’s definitely not stupid. He would want to graduate, because that’s what most teenagers do. Post-secondary education is a likely assumption as well, but depending on who you ask, his major differs. Computer science tends to be a common one, but Heero shows competence for literature and history. Though he has no political ambitions, political science wouldn’t be that far out of the realm of possibility. Anything that requires deep thinking would also be a decent choice, such as philosophy.

Ultimately this would be his largest hurdle, trying to figure out what to do with his future when for so long he gave it no thought at all, assuming he didn’t have one. Being able to pursue a life without worrying about death, battles, or warfare would open up so many doors for him.

#  **In conclusion…**

In Heero’s rather short life, he’s endured a lot of psychological trauma and hardship not just because of how he was raised, but because of what he was trained to become. In the end, with some work, Heero could end up becoming a very productive member of civilian life, and live out his days as just an average guy.

**Author's Note:**

> It took MONTHS of drafting, revising, and editing, and then I had to sit on it until the content embargo was lifted because yes, I wrote this for Rhythm Generation because what better way to celebrate Gundam Wing’s silver anniversary than by calling out my boy and the fact that he’s a mess?
> 
> If someone ever asked me, “Karu, write a love letter to your most favourite anime character ever,” I would point to this and say, “I’ve already written it.” This is literally a culmination of how much I love Heero as a character and how long it took me to be able to put words together to bring that sort of topic the justice and attention it deserves.
> 
> In writing this meta, I finally understood.
> 
> I understood why Heero is my favourite anime character ever outside of the fact that Gundam Wing helped me through a fuckton of trauma. It took me being 100 percent objective to realise it. It scared me because I ended up realising a bunch of things about myself in the process.


End file.
